Elissa Bass

Investing for the first time is a lot like taking that plunge into a new activity - you are intimidated by everything you think you don't know and you don't want to appear clumsy in front of others. With the plethora of online brokerages, the opportunities for first-time investors are wide open. However, this wide variety of investment options means you do need to be educated before you begin. You don't want to put your money in the wrong hands when you start to invest.

Keith McGurrin, Certified Financial Planner and a lead financial planner at T. Rowe Price has some tips for newcomers.

"Investing has the potential to build funding for long-term goals," McGurrin said. "But, investing can also be risky, especially in the short-term. Having a plan can help - here are considerations for investors starting out."

Checking accounts are notorious for just sitting there and doing nothing for you except holding onto your cash until you need to pay a bill. But there are accounts out there that do pay interest - albeit minuscule - and offer other benefits and enticements! We've done the research for you.

Several things to look for in a checking account:

• No minimum to open
• No minimum to earn interest
• No ATM fees (plus a large network)
• No monthly maintenance fee
• Free checks
• Mobile check deposit and transferring

Here are the best checking accounts for 2018, find the latest rates in the table at the end of the article:

A Spousal Individual Retirement Account (IRA) is a special type of IRA that is designed to benefit a non-working spouse and allows a married couple to each have an IRA to help fund their retirement.
Internal Revenue Service rules require that you earn taxable compensation from work in order to have an IRA. The IRS defines "compensation" as income generated from a wage, salary, commission or self-employment. It also counts alimony, separate maintenance and tax-exempt military combat pay as compensation.
According to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, "If you file a joint return, you may be able to contribute to an IRA even if you did not have taxable compensation as long as your spouse did. The amount of your combined contributions can't be more than the taxable compensation reported on your joint return."
Related >> IRS guide to IRAs

What are the rules for a Spousal IRA?

The basic criteria for setting up a spousal IRA is that the married couple has to be filing jointly and has to have enough earned income to cover both the working spouse's own IRA contribution and the spousal IRA contribution on behalf of the non-working spouse.
For 2016, that equals $5,500 of earned income for each spouse, plus an additional $1,000 for each spouse who is 50 or older as of the end of the tax year. It can be a regular IRA or a Roth IRA, and once created, it operates exactly as either of those does.
Related >> What is a Roth IRA? A Short and Simple Guides
While the account can only be set up by a married couple, once the spousal IRA is created, it belongs solely to that individual, just as a regular IRA belongs to its funder. The spouse's Social Security or tax identification number is attached to the account, and the spouse has authority over investing and withdrawal decisions.
You cannot make any contribution to an IRA if your income consists entirely of unearned taxable income from sources, such as rental property, interest and dividends, pensions or annuities.
Related >> 11 Things You May Not Know About Retirement Accounts

Benefits of a Spousal IRA

If one partner has earned income and the other does not, then a Spousal IRA makes good retirement planning sense.
One tax benefit to the spousal IRA is if you do not participate in an employer-sponsored retirement plan, such as a 401(k), you will be able to deduct the full amount of your spousal IRA contribution from your taxes. If you do participate in an employer-sponsored plan, your ability to deduct your spousal IRA contribution depends on your income and your tax filing status.
A spousal IRA is likely a good idea for any married couple with one non-employed partner. Knowing if you can handle the contributions based on your household expenses, other budgetary restraints, and your overall income, is a decision you need to make. Consulting a certified financial planner or tax advisor is always a good idea if you are unsure.

What else not to do: Don't name your estate as your IRA beneficiary (also important to note: if you DON'T name a beneficiary, your estate becomes the default). Typically, nonspouse beneficiaries who inherit a traditional IRA can either liquidate and pay taxes on those assets within five years of the owner's death, or take the so-called "stretch option" and stretch the required minimum distributions out over their own lifetime. This could amount to thousands of dollars of lost growth. On top of that, if the IRA becomes part of your estate and enters probate, it can be accessed by creditors.
Has anyone seen that form? Do you know where your IRA beneficiary form is? Don't assume it's easily accessible from your broker or bank, because with all the mergers and acquisitions over the last decade, paperwork may have become lost in the shuffle. So, find that piece of paper -- and all your important financial documents -- and secure them. Then, tell your attorney and your family members where you have stored them.

Inheriting an IRA as a Spouse

According to the IRS, if you inherit a traditional IRA from your spouse, you generally have the following three choices. You can:

1. Treat it as your own IRA by designating yourself as the account owner.
2. Treat it as your own by rolling it over into your IRA, or to the extent it is taxable, into a:

• Qualified employer plan,
• Qualified employee annuity plan (section 403(a) plan),
• Tax-sheltered annuity plan (section 403(b) plan),
• Deferred compensation plan of a state or local government (section 457 plan), or

3. Treat yourself as the beneficiary rather than treating the IRA as your own.
If you treat it as your own
You will be considered to have chosen to treat the IRA as your own if:

 

Sometimes it's hard to think about making those IRA contributions and taking the time out to understand IRA contribution limits because, well, retirement seems so far off. But the U.S. tax structure has several incentives that make both Roth and traditional IRAs worth the look. It also pays to make sure you know about deductions relating to your income level, so we'll deal with that here as well.

IRA contribution limits

For the 2016 tax year, the contribution limits on IRA contributions are:

I've just come from the gym. My arms are so spent I can barely type. My glutes are killing me as I sit on my wooden chair. I am guzzling ice water and still sweating a little. An hour of concentrated exercise with a trainer -- part of my gym memberships -- has left me feeling both exhausted and accomplished. I love my gym.

My gym membership costs us $158.46 per month. I can hear the gasps of horror from the frugal corner: that's 1,901.52 a year! Over the next 10 years, that's almost $20K I could be putting into my Roth IRA. That's $5,704.56 we could be putting into the 529 college account for our second child (you remember him, the one we call Hope He Gets A Soccer Scholarship)! I could use that to open a stock investment account and invest in electronic-traded funds. I could purchase corporate bonds!

The recent uproar over the cost of EpiPens, the life saving self-injection device that contains epinephrine, a chemical that narrows blood vessels and opens airways in the lungs to offset an allergic reaction, has garnered tremendous media attention and consumer outrage. Through massive marketing and outreach efforts by the manufacturer, Mylan, EpiPen has become to the go-to device for anyone facing a potentially serious or life-threatening allergic reaction. It is a brand that has “become” the device, like Kleenex has “become” tissues, and Jet Ski has become the catch-all for personal watercraft.
The EpiPen price has been raised 17 times in 11 years. When Mylan bought the device from Merck KgAA, a German company, in 2007, it cost $124 for a two-pack. Today, a two-pack costs more than $600. And there is no real competitor in the market, as Auvi-Q, a similar product launched in 2013 by Sanofi, was withdrawn in 2015 because of dosing issues. Mylan controls 94% of this market.
Under fire from all sides for the last few weeks, Mylan announced it would rapidly bring to market a generic, but is unclear how much impact this will have.

A complicated scenario

Here's what I learned when I was researching this issue: while Mylan does control the price of the product, it does not control the price to consumers — health insurance companies do. According to an article published recently by Ronny Gal, Ph.D., a senior analyst at the investment bank Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. (I found it on a fascinating website called drugchannels.net), in the wake of Sanofi pulling its drug, “Mylan was in a position to price up Epipen, which they did — by 15% in November and by another 15% in May. … The (insurance) payors got mad and raised the pain level on patients — raising copays and toughening medical policies (this is important, Mylan does not determine price to consumers, payors do). As Epipen is broadly purchased ahead of the new school year, the pain became acute for many families over the past month. There were lots of posts on mother's networks, the media caught wind of the story and now we have multiple politicians jumping on the bandwagon.”
This got me thinking about the cost of prescriptions in general. Way, way back in the good old days of the mid-1980s, when I first entered the working world, I had a $5 co-pay on my prescriptions. Over the years, as insurance plans have morphed and HMOs were invented and employers began searching for ways to save money, we had a tiered prescription plan that started at $5 for basic generic drugs and ended at $50 for really important stuff.
Today, under my husband's company's insurance plan, we have a $3,000 annual deductible we have to meet. Until we hit that $3K, we pay out of pocket for EVERYTHING. This has ended up being quite an education, especially since we are at the age now where there are daily medications for things like blood pressure and prostate. Luckily (or unluckily), we have had a run of bad health and met the deductible for the first time, about halfway through the year.
It is these broad-deductible types of plans (which I think more and more of us are opting for as a way to save up front on the premiums taken out of the paycheck) that are making many of us painfully aware of the full cost of prescription drugs.
As Matthew Herper recently noted in an article on forbes.com, “If a customer is paying a $73 co-payment on a $600 device, this is a good deal. But a lot of consumers no longer simply have a co-pay on their drug purchases. They have a large deductible — an amount of money they must spend before their insurance kicks in. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey last September found 24% of consumers had high-deductible plans. ObamaCare is one reason for the rise, but another is that employers are turning to these plans more frequently.” Remember, too, that is the insurers who are determining the costs to the consumers by manipulating copays, discounts and rebates, not Mylan.
And in multiple interviews, Mylan chief executive Heather Bresch has made it a point to note that Mylan “only” gets $275 of the $608 list price for two EpiPens.

Hunting for affordable medications

The high cost of his prescriptions led my husband on a mission to figure out the lowest-cost way we could deal with it. Because even generics — if there are any — aren't cheap anymore. He discovered a website called GoodRX, which not only showed him the price of his medications at all our area pharmacies, but also offered a big-discount coupon. So my husband now gets his medications at WalMart, which is considerably cheaper than other pharmacies in our area, and uses the coupons. There are other similar websites out there.
Another smart strategy is to always ask your doctor for samples and coupons. They have closets FULL of samples. Our son has acne, and when we went to the doctor to have it looked at, he prescribed two medications, one being Epiduo. This is $300-$400 for 1 small tube and it's not covered by most Medicare and insurance plans (including ours). Now, acne is not life-threatening, but for a 15-year-old boy, it might feel like it.
Luckily, our doctor loaded me up with samples and also gave me a one-time coupon. We filled it once, using that coupon (cost to us $45). Since then we have just used the samples. His prescription for clindamycin phosphate was almost as expensive, but I discovered there are over the counter creams that have the same ingredient, and with pharmacy coupons I can get it cheaper than it would be with prescription discounts.
Hunting for discounts, rebates and coupons, asking your doctor for as many samples as they will spare, shopping from pharmacy to pharmacy to get the best price (the disparity among stores is shocking as well), and making sure you understand your insurance coverage and are getting the most out of it — these are all keys to helping to manage the cost of your medications. Needless to say, I am not looking forward to those golden years, when our medications increase and our ability to pay goes down.
How about you? What tips do you have for managing the cost of your prescriptions? Tell us here in the comments or on our Facebook page!

As I write this, I am on vacation. And I'm not just working for GRS while on my break. I'm posting on social media for six other clients, and writing freelance pieces for two other websites.

So when I say I am on vacation, I really mean that I am working in a house that is not my own, with a lovely view of a beach. Since being laid off from my traditional full time job three years ago, I have fashioned a working life that involves working for multiple entities, doing multiple tasks.

Staying Afloat When Prospects are Slim

My most stable employer provides 25 hours a week (but it's also the lowest paying). The rest range anywhere from 3 to 10 hours a week, depending on what's happening and what's needed. Some of the work is seasonal. Some clients pop up for a few hours' work and then disappear for months.

We joined a CSA this year, our first time venturing into the realm of Community Supported Agriculture. I have been intrigued with the concept for several years, as I have friends who rave about their weekly boxes of fresh veggies from a local farm. A special deal popped up in my Facebook feed in late winter and I decided to do it.

We shelled out $475 ($450 for the CSA and $25 one-time delivery fee). The reason I finally took the plunge is because the CSA was coming from a farm in Salem, Connecticut, (about 30 miles from my home) but was being delivered to a farm in our town (about a 7 minute drive up the road). So the convenience factor weighed heavily in the decision.

The first rule of Data Club is don't go over your monthly data allotment.
The second rule of Data Club is if you do go over, only go over a little.
The third rule of Data Club is hope Dad doesn't notice we've gone over our data allotment because he will be mad and will give us a talking-to. Ah, data. The modern-day parents' nightmare. In my parents' day, we had a phone bill, and that paid for the phone. One phone. In the house, attached to the wall. A decade or two later came the cable bill, which paid for that giant box on the top of the TV that allowed us to endlessly watch the same seven movies on what was then called Home Box Office. Those were good times.

These days, we have a cable bill, which includes our VOIP phone line (which is only good for calling our cell phones when we can't find them and fighting off the Help desk from “Microsoft Windows.”) Our cable bill, which gives us television, internet and house phone, averages $200 a month. The only variable is the occasional movie On Demand, which we seldom use because we like Netflix.
Our wireless comes to us from our friends at AT&T, and I just want to say right up front for the record that I have been an AT&T wireless customer since my first flip phone, and I like the company. We get great coverage, including at my mother's house in the Berkshire Hills, where no one else's cell phone seems to work, and I have always had positive customer service interactions.
Our wireless bill (we have four phones, unlimited talk and text, and the Mobile Share Value 15GB with Rollover Data Plan) is about $300 a month. Unless (cue scary music) we go over the data.
I remember when I bought my first smartphone and I got a data plan. I think it was 1GB. I distinctly remember the phone store guy telling me, "You will never come close to using that up unless you stream videos 24 hours a day." Those were good times.
Recently, our family violated the third rule of Data Club — we went so far over the data allotment that Dad/Husband noticed and we received a talking-to. We were 5 GB over, which equals $50. And while we all received The Talk, there was really only one culprit: the 15-year-old.

That's right. The 12,620 belongs to the 15-year-old. The 5,149 belongs to the 18-year-old. The 1,273 is mine. And the 119 is Dad/Husband (I know, he's adorable, right? Half that was probably accidental.)
Now, it's not like I am not always yelling at them "Use wifi!!!" Because I am. And I won't ever book a vacation at a place that doesn't have free wifi. Because it's 2016, and we are on our phones. So if your advice is to tell me to "put down our phones," keep it to yourself. We aren't going to.
The 15-year-old is often in places without wifi, including 10-hour long track meets and 2-hour long bus rides to and from said track meets. So I get it, at least intellectually. But it doesn't make it less of a challenge.

It's Not Just My Problem

It's always good to know you aren't alone, so I posed the question on the Get Rich Slowly Facebook page, where there is always a plethora of great ideas and suggestions (and very little judgment!). Here are some:
Draconian: We turned off her phone. We said turn off your data, and she didn't, multiple months in a row. We gave her notice, and it was closed. She's 18 so she can get her own phone and pay for all the data she wants.
Not just kids: No children but I do have a husband that recently acquired a new tablet and new wireless earbuds with what was just supposed to be a new phone purchase. So now our bill is $300+ dollars a month. We have unlimited data, though I still prefer to use wifi (it's faster). I sometimes wonder if kids would be cheaper.
It turns out there's an app for that: Verizon offers a family management plan for $5 per month. I set the data caps, hours that the phone is operable, can see what numbers are called/being called and could block certain numbers if needed. The hours of operation are set so the phone doesn't work during the hours she is supposed to be home and asleep. The only time we went over the data limit was when my husband over used! Then I put him in a data cap too :). Easy enough to override when we want, so you could easily let the kids use more data if they want to pay you for it.
And this one too: I discovered that I could cap the data used for each phone on my plan by logging into my account on my provider's website. So I decided how much I was willing to pay and then capped the data at that. (2GB per phone.) I told my two teenagers what I had done. My daughter hit her cap once, and then had no data until the new month when it automatically turned back on. She now budgets her data wisely. But my son hits his data cap within two weeks every month and then is sad until it refreshes. I am hoping that one of these days he'll learn to pace himself, but in the meantime he is only hurting himself. I always tell them if they don't like it they can pay for their own but they'd rather have less with me paying for it than to pay for it themselves.
Slow it down: No teens yet, but we're on StraightTalk. 5GB a month, then the speed throttles *way* down. Painful, to say the least. It will teach moderation pretty quickly
The sky's the limit: Unlimited data. Makes more sense and I don't ever have to worry about my kiddo not being able to contact me.
Punishment and then a little more punishment: Loss of privileges. Then re-earn privileges with 6 months on a prepaid plan. (Like virgin/trac phone/etc) harsh and inconvenient, but necessary.
And judgment: I taught them respect and responsibility early. She pays her own phone bill. Maybe don't enable them to think they are getting a free ride?

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